[Bug 48175] Re: Partition editor freezes on the install

[Devin Ben-Hur]

I'm getting similar freezes with a Dapper install on a newly built
system.

After some poking around, what I've found is that i can generally run
indefinately off the live CD, but once I run Gparted and it does it's
initial device scan, the next time the system accesses the CD (usually
when I Apply Gparted actions, but it could be anything that has to load
from disk), it gets a media error (bad sector) on /hda and locks up. If
I'm lucky, an open terminal or console will let me run dmesg (which is
where I see the media error for hda), though often I can't even get that
far and Alt-SysRq-t produces no output.

I've tried alternative boot options (acpi=off noapic nolapic) and a beta
mb BIOS (v3.35) to no avail. I've run a 4 hour memtest and verified the
CD media (all pass).

System:
MSI K8NGM2-FID (GeForce 6150 + nForce 430)
AMD64 X2 3800+
2GB OCZ PC3200 CAS-2 memory pair.
2 x 300GB 7200.9 Seagate Barracuda SATA2 drives.
NEC IDE DVD Burner ND-3550A

Here's what I could transcribe of the dmesg output:
----
[313.342049] hda: media error (bad sector): status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplte Error }
[313.342058]  hda: media error (bad sector): error=0x34 { AbortedCommand LastFailedSense=0x03 }
[313.342066] end request: I/O error dev hda sector 161224
[313.342071] Buffer I/O error on device hda logical block 40306
----
This repeats twice on sequential sectors and then the system hangs.

I've successfully used cfdisk to write some partitions without the hang
problem (and i'm now exploring mkfs to see if I can follow thru and get
an install without using Gparted at all).  The freeze appears to be set
up by something that happens in the Gparted device scan conducted when
launched.

-- 
Partition editor freezes on the install
https://launchpad.net/bugs/48175